I can’t believe I didn’t blog about this before. I better blog now before 2013 becomes 2014!

Sometimes in a writer’s life events transpire to really give them a boost. This year it was my turn.

In 2012, Roelof Bakker, a photographer based in London (in my neighborhood of Crouch End, in fact) asked short story writers to contribute to his book of photographs.

I contributed a story called My Wife The Hyena.

STILL is a beautiful book, full of evocative photographs of empty spaces. The short stories from an international group of writers are wonderful. (I will be doing an interview with Roelof Bakker in January. )

In a gorgeous serendipity, one of the other short story contributors, Nicholas Royle, a novelist and editor at SALT Publishing who publishes Best British Short Stories, read my story in STILL and called me up. He said, “You’re not by any chance a British Citizen are you?”

I had just become a British citizen that morning and had celebrated with a delicious English fry-up which I was still trying to digest.